Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara to curate 2018 Venice Biennale

The Board of the Venice Architecture Biennale appointed Grafton Architects co-founders Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara yesterday as the curators of the 16th International Architecture Exhibition, which will take place May 26 to November 25 in 2018.

UTEC campus in Lima, designed by Grafton Architects.

The Venice Biennale is familiar ground to Farrell and McNamara, who participated in the Biennale in 2002 and won the Silver Lion in 2012, where they presented their project for the UTEC campus in Lima — the winner of the inaugural RIBA International Prize. Grafton Architects was represented at the 2016 Biennale under the title, “The Physics of Culture”.

Farrell and McNamara will continue to address similar humanitarian themes set forth in Alejandro Aravena's “Reporting from the Front” last year. President Paolo Baratta, chair of the Board of the Venice Biennale, released the following statement on their appointment:

“The Exhibition curated by Alejandro Aravena offered visitors a critical overview of the worldwide evolution of architecture and underlined how important it is that a qualified demand on the part of individuals and communities be met by an equally effective response, thereby confirming that architecture is one of civil society’s instruments for organizing the space in which it lives and works.

Along these lines, Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara will continue to address the same theme but from the point of view of the quality of the public and private space, of urban space, of the territory and of the landscape as the main ends of architecture. The curators, who are well-known for the refinement of their work, are also known for their intense didactic activity and their ability to involve and fascinate new generations.”

Below, you can listen to a previous Archinect One-to-One episode featuring Yvonne Farrell: